Albert Camus, one of the most influential philosophers and writers of the 20th century, is known for his profound insights into the human condition, absurdity, and existentialism. His works, including The Stranger, The Myth of Sisyphus, and The Plague, continue to resonate with readers across the world. In this blog post, we will delve into some of the most thought-provoking and impactful Albert Camus quotes that capture his unique perspective on life, death, and the search for meaning.
Whether you’re an avid fan of his philosophical works or new to his writings, these quotes will offer valuable reflections on existence and the human experience.
Albert Camus Quotes
- Freedom is nothing but a chance to be better.
2. To lose one’s life is no great matter; when the time comes I’ll have the courage to lose mine. But what’s intolerable is to see one’s life being drained of meaning, to be told there’s no reason for existing. A man can’t live without some reason for living.
3. Beginning to think is beginning to be undermined.
4. Thoughts of suicide have got me through many a bad night.
5. After all perhaps the greatness of art lies in the perpetual tension between beauty and pain, the love of men and the madness of creation, unbearable solitude and the exhausting crowd, rejection and consent.
6. I said that the world is absurd, but I was too hasty. This world in itself is not reasonable, that is all that can be said. But what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart.
7. Art does not tolerate reason.
8. An achievement is a bondage. It obliges one to a higher achievement.
9. Retaliation is related to nature and instinct, not to law. Law, by definition, cannot obey the same rules as nature.
10. Man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.
11. It is not your paintings I like, it is your painting.
12. Give up the tyranny of female charm.
13. There is so much stubborn hope in the human heart.
14. To feel absolutely right is the beginning of the end.
15. Their guilt made me eloquent because I was not its victim.
16. Freedom is the right to never have to lie.
17. Every ideology is contrary to human psychology.
18. Absolute freedom mocks at justice. Absolute justice denies freedom.
19. Those who prefer their principles over their happiness, they refuse to be happy outside the conditions they seem to have attached to their happiness.
20. Healthy people have a natural skill of avoiding feverish eyes.
21. Poverty, first of all was never a misfortune for me; it was radiant with sunlight.. I owe it to my family, first of all, who lacked everything and who envied practically nothing.
22. Man cannot do without beauty, and this is what our era pretends to want to disregard.
23. Rebellion, in man, is the refusal to be treated as an object and to be reduced to simple historical terms. It is the affirmation of a nature common to all men, which eludes the world of power.
24. But what does it mean, the plague? It’s life, that’s all.
25. Ah cher ami, how poor in invention men are! They are They always think one commits suicide for a reason. But it’s quite possible to commit suicide for two reasons. No, that never occurs to them. So what’s the good of dying intentionally, of sacrificing yourself to the idea you want people to have of you? Once you are dead, they will take advantage of it to attribute idiotic or vulgar motives to your action. Martyrs, cher ami, must choose between being forgotten, mocked, or made use of. As for being understood–never!
26. Only it takes time to be happy. A lot of time. Happiness, too, is a long patience.
27. On the ridge where the great artist moves forward, every step is an adventure, an extreme risk. In that risk, however, and only there, lays the freedom of Art.
28. It is a well-known fact that we always recognize our homeland at the moment we are about to lose it.
29. Truly fertile Music, the only kind that will move us, that we shall truly appreciate, will be a Music conducive to Dream, which banishes all reason and analysis. One must not wish first to understand and then to feel. Art does not tolerate Reason.
30. How do you put everyone in the pool, so you have the right to dry yourself in the sun?
31. We used to wonder where war lived, what it was that made it so vile. And now we realize that we know where it lives… inside ourselves.
32. I am not made for politics because I am incapable of wanting or accepting the death of the adversary.
33. He had been bored, that’s all, bored like most people. Hence he had made himself out of whole cloth a life full of complications and drama. Something must happen – and that explains most human commitments. Something must happen, even loveless slavery, even war or death. Hurray then for funerals!
34. The artist forges himself to the others, midway between the beauty he cannot do without and the community he cannot tear himself away from. That is why true artists scorn nothing: they are obliged to understand rather than to judge.
35. For if there is a sin against life, it consists perhaps not so much in despairing of life as in hoping for another life and in eluding the implacable grandeur of this life.
36. Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that you toast in champagne. On the contrary, it’s hard graft and a long-distance run, all alone, very exhausting. Alone in a dreary room, alone in the dock before the judges, and alone to make up your mind, before yourself and before the judgement of others. At the end of every freedom there is a sentence, which is why freedom is too heavy to bear.
37. A craving for freedom and independence is generated only in a man still living on hope.
38. Martyrs, my friend, have to choose between being forgotten, mocked or used. As for being understood – never.
39. Truth is mysterious, elusive, always to be conquered. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to live with as it is elating. We must march toward these two goals, painfully but resolutely, certain in advance of our failings on so long a road.
40. Maman used to say that you can always find something to be happy about.
41. There’s the risk of being loved…and that would keep me from being happy.
42. To be born to create, to love, to win at games is to be born to live in time of peace. But war teaches us to lose everything and become what we were not. It all becomes a question of style.
43. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
44. No excuses ever, for anyone; that is my principle at the outset. I deny the good intention, the respectable mistake, the indiscretion, the extenuating circumstance. With me there is no giving of absolution or blessing.
45. Truth is not a virtue, but a passion. It is never charitable.
46. Nihilism is not only despair and negation, but above all the desire to despair and to negate.
47. A nihilist is not one who believes in nothing , but one who does not believe in what exists.
48. The mistake that men make is that they do not believe in theater. Otherwise, they would know that every man is allowed to play thecelestial tragedies and to become god. All he has to do is harden his heart.
49. To lose the touch of flowers and women’s hands is the supreme separation.
50. Great novelists are philosopher novelists – that is, the contrary of thesis-writers.
51. I may not have been sure about what really did interest me, but I was absolutely sure about what didn’t.
52. To me, art is not a solitary delight. It is a means of stirring the greatest number of men by providing them with a privileged image of our common joys and woes.
53. My life was lucky so that I met, I loved (and disappointed) only outstanding people.
54. I have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when this all ends. For the moment I know this: there are sick people and they need curing.
55. The society of merchants can be defined as a society in which things disappear in favor of signs. When a ruling class measures its fortunes, not by the acre of land or the ingot of gold, but by the number of figures corresponding ideally to a certain number of exchange operations, it thereby condemns itself to setting a certain kind of humbug at the center of its experience and its universe. A society founded on signs is, in its essence, an artificial society in which man’s carnal truth is handled as something artificial.
56. In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The required diligence and doggedness and lucidity thus resemble the conqueror’s attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s fate. For all these characters, their work defines them at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us this: There is no frontier between being and appearing.
57. Thus, in a middle course between these heights and depths, they drifted through life rather than lived, the prey of aimless days and sterile memories, like wandering shadows that could have acquired substance only by consenting to root themselves in the solid earth of their distress.
58. Sometimes, from beyond the skycrapers, the cry of a tugboat finds you in your insomnia, and you remember that this desert of iron and cement is an island.
59. To abandon oneself to principles is really to die – and to die for an impossible love which is the contrary of love.
60. Liberty is dangerous, as hard to get along with as it is exciting.
61. Mon cher ami, let’s not give them any pretext, no matter how small, for judging us!!! Otherwise, we’ll be left in shreds. We are forced to take the same precautions as the animal trainer. If, before going into the cage, he has the misfortune to cut himself while shaving, what a feast for the wild animals!!
62. The true work of art is always on the human scale. It is essentially the one that says, ‘less.
63. A work of art is a confession.
64. But what are a hundred million deaths? When one has served in a war, one hardly knows what a dead man is, after a while. And since a dead man has no substance unless one has actually seen him dead, a hundred million corpses broadcast through history are no more than a puff of smoke in the imagination.
65. Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
66. A trial cannot be conducted by announcing the general culpability of a civilization. Only the actual deeds which, at least, stank in the nostrils of the entire world were brought to judgment.
67. I would like to be able to breathe— to be able to love her by memory or fidelity. But my heart aches. I love you continuously, intensely.
68. Europe has lived on its contradictions, flourished on its differences, and, constantly transcending itself thereby, has created a civilization on which the whole world depends even when rejecting it. This is why I do not believe in a Europe unified under the weight of an ideology or of a technocracy that overlooked these differences.
69. The certainty of a God giving meaning to life far surpasses in attractiveness the ability to behave badly with impunity. The choice would not be hard to make. But there is no choice and that is where the bitterness comes in. The absurd does not liberate; it binds.
70. She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.
71. The first choice an artist makes is precisely to be an artist, and if he chooses to be an artist it is in consideration of what he is himself and because of a certain idea he has of art
72. Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.
73. Each generation doubtless feels called upon to reform the world. Mine knows that it will not reform it, but its task is perhaps even greater. It consists in preventing the world from destroying itself.
74. For the existentials, negation is their God. To be precise, that god is maintained only through the negation of human reason. But, like suicides, gods change with men.
75. Then we understand that rebellion cannot exist without a strange form of love. Those who find no rest in God or in history are condemned to live for those who, like themselves, cannot live; in fact, for the humiliated.
76. The current motto for all of us can only be this: without giving up anything on the plane of justice, yield nothing on the plane of freedom.
77. I have always thought it would be easier to redeem a man steeped in vice and crime than a greedy, narrow-minded, pitiless merchant.
78. I leave Sisyphus at the foot of the mountain. One always finds one’s burden again. But Sisyphus teaches the higher fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks. He too concludes that all is well. This universe henceforth without a master seems to him neither sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself, forms a world. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy.
79. Many fledgling moralists in those days were going about our town proclaiming there was nothing to be done about it and we should bow to the inevitable. And Tarrou, Rieux, and their friends might give one answer or another, but its conclusion was always the same, their certitude that a fight must be put up, in this way or that, and there must be no bowing down… There was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical.
80. Most men are like me. They cannot live in a universe where the most bizarre thought can in one second enter into the realm of reality–where, most often, it does enter, like a knife in a hear
81. Methods of thought which claim to give the lead to our world in the name of revolution have become, in reality, ideologies of consent and not of rebellion.
82. I have no friends, I only have accomplices now. On the other hand, my accomplices are more numerous than my friends: they are the human race.
83. At the age of 40, having ordered meat very rare in restaurants all his life, he realized he actually liked it medium and not at all rare.
84. The human heart has a tiresome tendency to label as fate only what crushes it. But happiness likewise, in its way, is without reason, since it is inevitable.
85. To think is first of all to create a world (or to limit one’s own world, which comes to the same thing).
86. Nothing is given to mankind and what little men can conquer must be paid for with unjust death. But man’s grandeur lies elsewhere, in his decision to rise above his condition.
87. Life is a sum of all your choices”. So, what are you doing today?
88. Where there is no hope, we must invent it.
89. Do not be afraid of spending quality time by yourself. Find meaning or don’t find meaning but “steal” some time and give it freely and exclusively to your own self. Opt for privacy and solitude. That doesn’t make you antisocial or cause you to reject the rest of the world. But you need to breathe. And you need to be.
90. Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
91. Poor and free rather than rich and enslaved. Of course, men want to be both rich and free, and this is what leads them at times to be poor and enslaved.
92. I know of only one duty, and that is to love
93. Integrity needs no rules.
94. It is necessary to fall in love… if only to provide an alibi for all the random despair you are going to feel anyway.
95. But above all, in order to be, never try to seem.
96. Some people talk in their sleep. Lecturers talk while other people sleep.
97. Peace is the only battle worth waging.
98. To know oneself, one should assert oneself.
99. Capital punishment is the most premeditated of murders.
100. After awhile you could get used to anything.
101. Truth, like light, is blinding. Lies, on the other hand, are a beautiful dusk, which enhances the value of each object.
102. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
103. There is a life and there is a death, and there are beauty and melancholy between.
104. We all carry within us places of exile, our crimes, our ravages. Our task is not to unleash them on the world; it is to transform them in ourselves and oth
105. Life should be lived to the point of tears.
106. I know simply that the sky will last longer than I.
107. It is easy to shield the outer body from poisoned arrows, but it is impossible to shield the mind from the poisoned darts that originate within itself. Greed, anger, foolishness and the infatuations of egoism – these four poisoned darts originate within the mind and infect it with deadly poison.
108. Liberty is the right not to lie.
109. …the habit of despair is worse than despair itself.
110. Alas, after a certain age every man is responsible for his face.
111. Madness such as this, its like trying to stop a fire with the moisture from a kiss
112. Every authentic work of art is a gift offered to the future.
113. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself.
114. The opposite of an idealist is too often a man without love.
115. It’s a kind of spiritual snobbery that makes people think they can be happy without money.
116. Greatness consists in trying to be great. There is no other way.
117. what doesn’t kill you make you stronger and stronger
118. We have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
119. Happiness is generous. It does not subsist on destruction.
120. The important thing isn’t the soundness or otherwise of the argument, but for it to make you think.
121. Love cannot accept what it is. Everywhere on earth it cries out against kindness, compassion, intelligence, everything that leads to compromise. Love demands the impossible, the absolute, the sky on fire, inexhaustible springtime, life after death, and death itself transfigured into eternal life.
122. Thinking is learning all over again how to see, directing one’s consciousness, making of every image a privileged place.
123. The mind’s deepest desire, even in its most elaborate operations, parallels man’s unconscious feeling in the face of his universe: it is an insistence upon familiarity, an appetite for clarity.
124. To govern means to pillage, as everyone knows.
125. Lying is not only saying what isn’t true. It is also, in fact especially, saying more than is true and, in the case of the human heart, saying more than one feels. We all do it, every day, to make life simpler.
126. Don’t believe your friends when they ask you to be honest with them. All they really want is to be maintained in the good opinion they have of themselves.
127. We are all special cases.
128. I am alive again, now that I can no longer stand to live.
129. Sometimes at night I would sleep open-eyed underneath a sky dripping with stars. I was alive then.
130. Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies.
131. Men are never convinced of your reasons, of your sincerity, of the seriousness of your sufferings, except by your death. So long as you are alive, your case is doubtful; you have a right only to their skepticism.
132. A man wants to earn money in order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the means are taken for the end.
133. We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
134. We are not so mad as to think that we shall create a world in which murder will not occur. We are fighting for a world in which murder will no longer be legal.
135. Turbulent childhood, adolescent daydreams in the drone of the bus’s motor, mornings, unspoiled girls, beaches, young muscles always at the peak of their effort, evening’s slight anxiety in a sixteen-year-old-heart, lust for life, fame, and ever the same sky through the years, unfailing in strength and light, itself insatiable, consuming one by one over a period of months the victims stretched out in the form of crosses on the beach at the deathlike hour of noon.
136. Fate is not in man but around him.
137. To live is in itself a value judgment. To breathe is to judge.
138. My profession lent itself nicely to my vocation for heights. It freed me of any bitterness towards my fellow men, who were alwaysin my debt, without my owing them anything. It placed me above the judge whom, I in turn judged, above the defendant whom I forced into gratitude.
139. I grew up with the sea, and poverty for me was sumptuous; then I lost the sea and found all luxuries gray and poverty unbearable.
140. The only really committed artist is he who, without refusing to take part in the combat, at least refuses to join the regular armies and remains a freelance.
141. Art and revolt will die only with the last man.
142. The slave and those whose present life is miserable and who can find no consolation in the heavens are assured that at least the future belongs to them. The future is the only kind of property that the masters willingly concede to the slaves.
143. You make the mistake of thinking you have to choose, that you have to do what you want, that there are conditions for happiness. What matters — all that matters, really is the will to happiness, a kind of enormous, ever present consciousness. The rest – women , art, success — is nothing but excuses. A canvas waiting for our embroideries.
144. If God did not exist, we should have to invent him. If God did exist, we should have to abolish Him.
145. True debauchery is liberating because it creates no obligations. In it you possess only yourself, hence it remains the favorite pastime of the great lovers of their own person.
146. We are living in the era of premeditation and the perfect crime. Our criminals are no longer helpless children who could plead love as their excuse. On the contrary, they are adults and the have the perfect alibi: philosophy, which can be used for any purpose – even for transforming murderers into judges.
147. For instance, I never complained that my birthday was overlooked; people were even surprised, with a touch of admiration, by my discretion on this subject. But the reason for my disinterestedness was even more discreet: I longed to be forgotten in order to be able to complain to myself… Once my solitude was thoroughly proved, I could surrender to the charms of a virile self-pity.
148. But sometimes it takes more courage to live than to shoot yourself.
149. What is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying.
150. Happiness too is inevitable.
151. A sub-clerk in the post office is the equal of a conqueror if consciousness is common to them. All experiences are indifferent in this regard. There are some that do either a service or a disservice to man. They do him a service if he is conscious. Otherwise, that has no importance: a man’s failures imply judgment, not of circumstances, but of himself.
152. Between history and the eternal I have chosen history because I like certainties. Of it, at least, I am certain, and how can I deny this force crushing me.
153. Cruel irony, the poor man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.
154. We [writers] must know that we can never escape the common misery and that our only justification, if indeed there is a justification, is to speak up, insofar as we can, for those who cannot do so.
155. How hard it is, how bitter it is to become a man!
156. But, you know, I feel more fellowship with the defeated than with saints. Heroism and sanctity don’t really appeal to me, I imagine. What interests me is being a man.
157. Rebellion cannot exist without the feeling that somewhere, in some way, you are justified.
158. Instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
159. After another moment’s silence she mumbled that I was peculiar, that that was probably why she loved me but that one day I might disgust her for the very same reason.
160. We continue to shape our personality all our life. If we knew ourselves perfectly, we should die.
161. For a man who loves power, competition from the gods is annoying. I have done away with that. I have proven to these illusory godsthat a man, if he has the will, can practice, without any apprenticeship, their ridiculous trade.
162. We must learn how to lend ourselves to dreaming when dreams lend themselves to us.
163. What I believe to be true I must therefore preserve. What seems to me so obvious, even against me, I must support.
164. We turn our backs on nature; we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer’s ink.
165. We can’t do without dominating others or being served…. The essential thing, in sum, is being able to get angry without the other person being able to answer back.
166. To two men living the same number of years, the world always provides the same sum of experiences. It is up to us to be conscious of them.
167. They hurt each other without wanting to, just because each represented to the others the cruel and demanding necessity of their lives.
168. Indeed, men never know how to love. nothing satisfies them. All they know is to dream, to imagine new duties, to look for new countries and new homes. While we women, we know that we must hasten to love, to share the same bed, hold hands, and fear absence. When we women love, we dream of nothing.
169. Do you believe in God, doctor?” No – but what does that really mean? I’m fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out. But I’ve long ceased finding that original.
170. I feel like getting married, or committing suicide, or subscribing to L’Illustration. Something desperate, you know.
171. The more I accuse myself, the more right I have to judge you. Even better, I make you judge yourself, which comforts me the more.
172. I knew that I had shattered the harmony of the day, the exceptional silence of a beach where I’d been happy. Then I fired four more times at the motionless body where the bullets lodged without leaving a trace. And it was like knocking four quick times on the door of unhappiness.
173. The absurd has meaning only in so far as it is not agreed to.
174. These are facts the heart can feel; yet they call for careful study before they become clear to the intellect.
175. Yes, there was an element of abstraction and unreality in misfortune. But when an abstraction starts to kill you, you have to get to work on it.
176. In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence isn’t a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogy of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it doesn’t always pass away and, from one bad dream to another, it is men who pass away, and the humanists first of all, because they have taken no precautions.
177. Freedom of the press is perhaps the freedom that has suffered the most from the gradual degradation of the idea of liberty.
178. …. Query: How contrive not to waste one’s time? Answer: By being fully aware of it all the while. Ways in which this can be done: By spending one’s days on an uneasy chair in a dentist’s waiting-room; by remaining on one’s balcony all of a Sunday afternoon; by listening to lectures in a language on doesn’t know; by traveling by the longest and least-convenient train routes, and of course standing all the way; by lining up at the box-office of theaters and then not buying a seat; and so forth.
179. Nobody realizes that some people expend tremendous energy merely to be normal.
180. Always go too far, because that’s where you’ll find the truth
181. Yes, everything is simple. It’s people who complicate things.
182. The welfare of the people in particular has always been the alibi of tyrants.
183. In the midst of winter, I found there was, within me, an invincible summer. And that makes me happy. For it says that no matter how hard the world pushes against me, within me, there’s something stronger – something better, pushing right back.
184. Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.
185. But what is happiness except the simple harmony between a man and the life he leads?
186. Get scared. It will do you good. Smoke a bit, stare blankly at some ceilings, beat your head against some walls, refuse to see some people, paint and write. Get scared some more. Allow your little mind to do nothing but function. Stay inside, go out – I don’t care what you’ll do; but stay scared as hell. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
187. Without work, all life goes rotten. But when work is soulless, life stifles and dies.
188. If we understood the enigmas of life there would be no need for art.
189. A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world.
190. She was waiting, but she didn’t know for what. She was aware only of her solitude, and of the penetrating cold, and of a greater weight in the region of her heart.
191. When I look at my life and its secret colors, I feel like bursting into tears.
192. Everything considered, a determined soul will always manage.
193. When silence or tricks of language contribute to maintaining an abuse that must be reformed or a suffering that can be relieved, then there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.
194. I can feel this heart inside me and I conclude it exists. I can touch this world and I also conclude that it exists. All my knowledge ends at this point. The rest is hypothesis.
195. And never have I felt so deeply at one and the same time so detached from myself and so present in the world.
196. An intellectual? Yes. And never deny it. An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. I like this, because I am happy to be both halves, the watcher and the watched. “Can they be brought together?” This is a practical question. We must get down to it. “I despise intelligence” really means: “I cannot bear my doubts.
197. I make myself strict rules in order to correct my nature. But it is my nature that I finally obey.
198. Believe me, religions are on the wrong track the moment they moralize and fulminate commandments. God is not needed to create guilt or to punish. Our fellow men suffice, aided by ourselves.
199. Having money is a way of being free of money.
200. I opened myself to the gentle indifference of the world.
201. No ends, simply means.
202. Revolt and revolution both wind up at the same crossroads: the police, or folly.
203. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion.
204. The harshest winter finds an invincible summer in us.
205. This world, such as it is, is not tolerable. Therefore I need the moon, or happiness, or immortality, I need something which is perhaps demented, but which is not of this world.
206. There are people who prefer to look their fate in the eye
207. There was a time when I didn’t at any minute have the slightest idea how I could reach the next one. Yes, one can wage war in this world, ape love, torture one’s fellow man, or merely say evil of one’s neighbour while knitting. But, in certain cases, carrying on, merely continuing, is superhuman.
208. Truth, like light, blinds. Falsehood, on the contrary, is a beautiful twilight that enhances every object.
209. Again and again there comes a time in history when the man who dares to say that two and two make four is punished with death. (“The Plague”)
210. The work of art is born of the intelligence’s refusal to reason the concrete. It marks the triumph of the carnal.
211. A guilty conscience needs to confess. A work of art is a confession.
212. There are people who vindicate the world, who help others live just by their presence.
213. Yes, and when the love of life disappears, no meaning can console us.
214. Only he who is uncompromising as to his rights maintains the sense of duty.
215. A person I knew used to divide human beings into three categories: those who prefer to have nothing to hide rather than being obliged to lie, those who prefer lying to having nothing to hide, and finally those who like both lying and the hidden.
216. What’s true of all the evils in the world is true of plague as well. It helps men to rise above themselves.
217. Some are created to love, while the others – to live.
218. There is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving. All of us, today, are dying of this misfortune. For violence and hatred dry up the heart itself; the long fight for justice exhausts the love that nevertheless gave birth to it.
219. It is not humiliating to be unhappy. Physical suffering is sometimes humiliating, but the suffering of being cannot be, it is life.
220. I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it.
221. The truth, as the light, makes blind.
222. The sense of doing good , the satisfaction of being right, the joy of looking favorably upon oneself, dear sir, are powerful levers for keeping us upright and making us progress. On the other hand, if men are deprived of that feeling, they are changed into rabid dogs.
223. In a world that has ceased to believe in sin, the artist is responsible for the preaching.
224. With rebellion, awareness is born
225. Happiness implied a choice, and within that choice a concerted will, a lucid desire.
226. There is no frontier between being and appearing.
227. Artistic creation is a demand for unity and a rejection of the world.
228. I know myself too well to believe in pure virtue.
229. For rich people, the sky is just an extra, a gift of nature. The poor, on the other hand, can see it as it is, a gift of infinite grace.
230. The world in which we were called to exist was an absurd world, and there was no other in which we could take refuge.
231. In the end, we would like not to be guilty while at the same time being dispensed of the effort of purifying ourselves. Not enough cynicism and not enough virtue.
232. Powerful, yes, that is the word that I constantly rolled on my tongue, I dreamed of absolute power, the kind that forces others tokneel, that forces the enemy to capitulate, finally converting him, and the more the enemy is blind, cruel, sure of himself, buried in his conviction, the more his admission proclaims the royalty of he who has brought on his defeat.
233. I was comfortable in all, I admit, but at the same time, nothing satisfied me. Each joy made me seek another.
234. Even when one sits in the prisoner’s dock, it is interesting to hear talk about oneself.
235. By definition, a government has no conscience. Sometimes it has a policy, but nothing more.
236. After all manner of professors have done their best for us, the place we are to get knowledge is in books. The true university of these days is a collection of books.
237. I was born poor and without religion, under a happy sky, feeling harmony, not hostility, in nature. I began not by feeling torn, but in plenitude.
238. There are always reasons for murdering a man. But there is no justification for his existence.
239. As soon as one does not kill oneself, one must keep silent about life.
240. I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.
241. To insure the adoration of a theorem for any length of time, faith is not enough, a police force is needed as well.
242. Men who have greatness within them don’t go in for politics.
243. False judges are held up in the world’s admiration and I alone know the true ones.
244. There are crimes of passion and crimes of logic. The boundary between them is not clearly defined.
245. The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist, Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.
246. What did it matter if he existed for two or for twenty years? Happiness was the fact that he had existed.
247. Wandering seemed no more than the happiness of an anxious man.
248. Those who weep for the happy periods which they encounter in history acknowledge what they want; not the alleviation but the silencing of misery.
249. There can be no question of holding forth on ethics. I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules
250. The more I produce, the less I am certain. On the road along which the artist walks, night falls ever more densely. Finally, he dies blind.
251. I have a good, hearty laugh and an energetic handshake, and those are trump cards.
252. There are means that cannot be excused. And I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice. I don’t want just any greatness for it, particularly a greatness born of blood and falsehood. I want to keep it alive by keeping justice alive.
253. There is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom insight and life of each person who has known and loved it.
254. Why must one love rarely to love well?
255. Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.
256. The Four Conditions of Happiness: Life in the open air, Love for another being,Freedom from ambition,Creation
257. There are causes worth dying for, but none worth killing for.
258. Humans are creatures, who spent their lifes trying to convince themselves, that their existence is not absurd
259. The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding.
260. The most knowledgeable person in one domain may be the most ignorant in another.
261. All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning.
262. A man is more a man through the things he keeps to himself than through those he says.
263. That is love, to give away everything, to sacrifice everything, without the slightest desire to get anything in return.
264. There is scarcely any passion without struggle.
265. The society based on production is only productive, not creative.
266. To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
267. No matter what cause one defends, it will suffer permanent disgrace if one resorts to blind attacks on crowds of innocent people.
268. You have so much inside you, and the noblest happiness of all. Don’t just wait for a man to come along. That’s the mistake so many women make. Find your happiness in yourself.
269. The tragedy is not that we are alone, but that we cannot be. At times I would give anything in the world to no longer be connected by anything to this universe of men.
270. The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.
271. The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily.
272. There is no love of life without despair of life.
273. Violence is both unavoidable and unjustifiable.
274. You have to be very rich or very poor to live without a trade.
275. When I was young, I expected from people more than they could give: neverending friendship and constant excitement. Now I expect less than they can actually can give: to stay close silently. And their feelings, friendship, noble deeds always seem like a miracle to me: a true grace.
276. Those who write clearly have readers.
277. I know that man is capable of great deeds. But if he isn’t capable of great emotion, well, he leaves me cold.
278. Every rebellion implies some kind of unity.
279. Nothing in life is worth, turning your back on, if you love it.
280. Does the end justify the means? That is possible. But what will justify the end? To that question, which historical thought leaves pending, rebellion replies: the means.
281. To create is likewise to give a shape to one’s fate
282. Without freedom there is no art.
283. If, after all, men cannot always make history have a meaning, they can always act so that their own lives have one.
284. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking.
285. We are condemned to live together.
286. There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely, that a man is always prey to his truths. Once he has admitted them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay something. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is forever bound to it.
287. When the imagination sleeps, words are emptied of their meaning: a deaf population absent-mindedly registers the condemnation of a man. … there is no other solution but to speak out and show the obscenity hidden under the verbal cloak.
288. I do not want to found anything on the incomprehensible. I want to know whether I can live with what I know and with that alone.
289. To understand one’s world, one must sometimes turn away from it! To serve better, one must briefly hold it at a distance. Where can the necessary solitude be found, the long breathing space in which mind gathers its strength and takes stock of its courage.
290. It is not true that the heart wears out – but the body creates this illusion.
291. Freedom is not a gift received from the State or leader, but a possession to be won every day by the effort of each and the union of all.
292. In the world there is, parallel to the force of death and constraint, an enormous force of persuasion that is called culture.
293. The laws of nature may be operative up to a certain limit, beyond which they turn against themselves to give birth to the absurd.
294. From the evening breeze to this hand on my shoulder, everything has its truth.
295. Somebody has to have the last word. If not, every argument could be opposed by another and we’d never be done with it.
296. We’re going forward, but nothing changes.
297. For what gives value to travel is fear. It breaks down a kind of inner structure we have. Travel robs us of such refuge. Far from our own people, our own language, stripped of all our props, deprived of our masks (one doesn’t know the fare on the streetcars, or anything else), we are completely on the surface of ourselves.
298. I cling like a miser to the freedom that disappears as soon as there is an excess of things.
299. Heroism is accessible. Happiness is more difficult.
300. The love of God is a hard love. It demands total self-surrender, disdain of our human personality. And yet it alone can reconcile us to suffering and the deaths of children, it alone can justify them, since we cannot understand them, and we can only make God’s will ours.
301. What is a rebel? A man who says no: but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation.
302. Without memories, without hope, they lived for the moment only. indeed, the here and now had come to mean everything to them. For there is no denying that the plague had gradually killed off in all of us the faculty not of love only but even of friendship. Naturally enough, since love asks something of the future, and nothing was left us but a series of present moments.
303. Have you no hope at all? And do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?” “Yes,” I said.
304. We spend our days in deliberating, and we end them without coming to any resolve.
305. He was expressing his certainty that my appeal would be granted, but I was carrying the burden of a sin from which I had to free myself. According to him, human justice was nothing and divine justice was everything. I pointed out it was the former that had condemned me.
306. I felt that I had been happy and that I was happy again. For everything to be consummated, for me to feel less alone, I had only to wish that there be a large crowd of spectators the day of my execution and that they greet me with cries of hate.
307. One might think, that a period which, within fifty years, uproots, enslaves or kills seventy million human beings, should only, and forthwith, be condemned. But also its guilt must be understood.
308. In our wildest aberrations we dream of an equilibrium we have left behind and which we naively expect to find at the end of our errors. Childish presumption which justifies the fact that child-nations, inheriting our follies, are now directing our history.
309. I was always able to understand my friend who decided to quit smoking and who, through an effort of will, succeeded in doing so. One morning, he opened the newspaper, read that the first H- bomb had exploded, found out about the bomb’s admirable effects and went straight to the tobacconist’s.
310. There is always a certain hour of the day and of the night when a man’s courage is at its lowest ebb, and it was that hour only that he feared.
311. In order to understand the world, one has to turn away from it on occasion; in order to serve others better, one has to hold them at a distance for a time. But where can one find the solitude necessary to vigor, the deep breath in which the mind collects itself and courage gauges its strength? There remain big cities.
312. In order to exist, man must rebel, but rebellion must respect the limits that it discovers in itself – limits where minds meet, and in meeting, begin to exist.
313. Likewise and during every day of an unillustrious life, time carries us. But a moment always comes when we have to carry it.
314. In a universe suddenly divested of illusion and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land.
315. Whereas the Greeks gave to will the boundaries of reason, we have come to put the will’s impulse in the very center of reason, which has, as a result, become deadly.
316. He knew now that it was his own will to happiness which must make the next move. But if he was to do so, he realized that he must come to terms with time, that to have time was at once the most magnificent and the most dangerous of experiments. Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.
317. For those of us who have been thrown into hell, mysterious melodies and the torturing images of a vanished beauty will always bring us, in the midst of crime and folly, the echo of that harmonious insurrection which bears witness, throughout the centuries, to the greatness of humanity.
318. The greatness of man lies in his decision to be stronger than his condition.
319. Every time I hear a political speech or I read those of our leaders, I am horrified at having, for years, heard nothing which sounded human. It is always the same words telling the same lies. And the fact that men accept this, that the people’s anger has not destroyed these hollow clowns, strikes me as proof that men attribute no importance to the way they are governed; that they gamble – yes, gamble – with a whole part of their life and their so called ‘vital interests.
320. Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.
321. In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
322. You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
323. Life is the sum of your choices.
324. Believe me there is no such thing as great suffering, great regret, great memory….everything is forgotten, even a great love. That’s what’s sad about life, and also what’s wonderful about it. There is only a way of looking at things, a way that comes to you every once in a while. That’s why it’s good to have had love in your life after all, to have had an unhappy passion- it gives you an alibi for the vague despairs we all suffer from.
325. Freedom is not a reward or a decoration that is celebrated with champagne…Oh no! It’s a…long distance race, quite solitary and very exhausting.
326. Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity.
327. The modern mind is in complete disarray. Knowledge has stretched itself to the point where neither the world nor our intelligence can find any foot-hold. It is a fact that we are suffering from nihilism.
328. Imagination offers people consolation for what they cannot be, and humor for what they actually are.
329. The only real progress lies in learning to be wrong all alone.
330. A loveless world is a dead world.
331. The only serious question in life is whether to kill yourself or not.
332. When the body is sad, the heart languishes.
333. Men cry because things are not what they ought to be.
334. Beauty, no doubt, does not make revolutions. But a day will come when revolutions will have need of beauty.
335. Any country where I am not bored is a country that teaches me nothing.
336. I see many people die because they judge that life is not worth living. I see others paradoxically getting killed for the ideas or illusions that give them a reason for living (what is called a reason for living is also an excellent reason for dying). I therefore conclude that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions.
337. Men must live and create. Live to the point of tears.
338. It is better to burn than to disappear.
339. There are some individuals who have too strong a craving, a will, and a nostalgia for happiness ever to reach it. They always retain a bitter and passionate aftertaste, and that’s the best they can hope for.
340. I sometimes need to write things which I cannot completely control but which therefore prove that what is in me is stronger than I am.
341. Life can be magnificent and overwhelming — that is the whole tragedy. Without beauty, love, or danger it would almost be easy to live.
342. As a remedy to life in society I would suggest the big city. Nowadays, it is the only desert within our means.
343. Today we are always as ready to judge as we are to fornicate.
344. I like people who dream or talk to themselves interminably; I like them, for they are double. They are here and elsewhere.
345. The look of success, when it is worn a certain way, would infuriate a jackass.
346. To remain a man in today’s world, one must have not only unfailing energy and unwavering intensity, one must also have a little luck.
347. An intense feeling carries with it its own universe, magnificent or wretched as the case may be.
348. I was assailed by memories of a life that wasn’t mine anymore, but one in which I’d found the simplest and most lasting joys.
349. The nobility of our calling will always be rooted in two commitments difficult to observe: refusal to lie about what we know, and resistance to oppression.
350. It is impossible to give a clear account of the world, but art can teach us to reproduce it-just as the world reproduces itself in the course of its eternal gyrations. The primordial sea indefatigably repeats the same words and casts up the same astonished beings on the same sea-shore.
351. It is in the thick of calamity that one gets hardened to the truth – in other words, to silence.
352. In short, they were gambling on their luck, and luck is not to be coerced.
353. The danger of lectures is that they create the illusion of teaching for teachers, and the illusion of learning for learners.
354. The Poor Man whom everyone speaks of, the Poor Man whom everyone pities, one of the repulsive Poor from whom charitable souls keep their distance, he has still said nothing. Or, rather, he has spoken through the voice of Victor Hugo, Zola, Richepin. At least, they said so. And these shameful impostures fed their authors. Cruel irony, the Poor Man tormented with hunger feeds those who plead his case.
355. There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide.
356. There is a metaphysical honour in ending the world’s absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, absurd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign in which he is defeated in advance…. War cannot be negated. One must live it or die of it. So it is with the absurd: it is a question of breathing with it, of recognizing its lessons and recovering their flesh. In this regard the absurd joy par excellence is creation. “Art and nothing but art”, said Nietzsche, “we have art in order not to die of the truth.”
357. If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of acompletely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.
358. I draw from the Absurd three consequences: my revolt, my liberty, my passion.
359. There are plagues, and there are victims, and it’s the duty of good men not to join forces with the plagues.
360. What more ghastly image can be called up than that of a man betrayed by his body who, simply because he did not die in time, lives out the comedy while awaiting the end, face to face with that God he does not adore, serving him as he served life, kneeling before a void and arms outstretched toward a heaven without eloquence that he knows to be also without depth?
361. In order to be created, a work of art must first make use of the dark forces of the soul
362. I have never been able to renounce the light, the pleasure of being, and the freedom in which I grew up.
363. But – I cannot make a choice. I have my own sorrow, but I suffer with him, too; I share his pain. I understand all – that is my trouble.
364. Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.
365. In the vast reaches of the dry, cold night, thousands of stars were constantly appearing, and their sparkling icicles, loosened at once, began to slip gradually toward the horizon.
366. It is immoral not to tell.
367. The act of love . . . is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.
368. Life is the result of all your choices
369. A character is never the author who created him. It is quite likely, however, that an author may be all his characters simultaneously.
340. Life is meaningless, but worth living, provided you recognize it’s meaningless.
341. There always comes a time when one must choose between contemplation and action. This is called becoming a man.
342. Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present.
343. You cannot create experience. You must undergo it.
344. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way.
345. People hasten to judge in order not to be judged themselves.
346. What is a rebel? A man who says no.
347. Love is the kind of illness that does not spare the intelligent or the dull.
348. We turn toward God only to obtain the impossible.
349. No one who lives in the sunlight of gratitude that things aren’t worse makes a failure of his or her life.
350. There is in me an anarchy and frightful disorder. Creating makes me die a thousand deaths, because it means making order, and my entire being rebels against order. But without it I would die, scattered to the winds.
351. Women are all we know of paradise on this earth.
352. A lot of jobs don’t allow you to be who you are. There is dignity in work only when it is work freely accepted.
353. I had only a little time left and I didn’t want to waste it on God.
354. Why should it be essential to love rarely in order to love much?
355. A true masterpiece does not tell everything.
356. The urge to revolt is one of the essential dimensions of human nature.
357. Who taught you all this, doctor?” The reply came promptly: “Suffering.
358. Whatever prevents you from doing your work has become your work.
359. Morality, when formal, devours.
360. There is a solitude in poverty, but a solitude which restores to each thing its value.
361. All I know of morality I learned from football.
362. I have never been able, really, to regret anything in all my life. I have always been far much too absorbed in the present moment or the immediate future to think back.
363. A free press can, of course, be good or bad, but, most certainly without freedom, the press will never be anything but bad.
364. Thinking of the future, establishing aims for oneself, having preferences-all this presupposes a belief in freedom, even if one occasionally ascertains that one doesn’t feel it.
365. You must have a love, a great love, to ensure an alibi at unjustified despairs that conquer all of us
366. … unhappiness is like marriage. We believe we chose it, but then it is choosing us. That is how it is, we can do nothing about it.
367. Travel, which is like a greater and a graver science, brings us back to ourselves.
368. A man devoid of hope and conscious of being so has ceased to belong to the future.
369. If there is a soul, it is a mistake to believe that it is given to us fully created. It is created here, throughout a whole life. And living is nothing else but that long and painful bringing forth.
370. I’d have given ten conversations with Einstein for a first meeting with a pretty chorus girl.
371. A man’s work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
372. The desire for possession is insatiable, to such a point that it can survive even love itself. To love, therefore, is to sterilize the person one loves.
373. All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant’s revolving door.
374. Life continues, and some mornings, weary of the noise, discouraged by the prospect of the interminable work to keep after, sickened also by the madness of the world that leaps at you from the newspaper, finally convinced that I will not be equal to it and that I will disappoint everyone – all I want to do is sit down and wait for evening. This is what I feel like, and sometimes I yield to it.
375. It happens that the stage sets collapse. Rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday and Saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. But one day the “why” arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement.
376. For there is merely bad luck in not being loved; there is misfortune in not loving.
377. But all the long speeches, all the interminable days and hours that people had spent talking about my soul, had left me with the impression of a colorless swirling river that was making me dizzy.
378. A novel is never anything but a philosophy expressed in images. And in a good novel the philosophy has disappeared into the images.
379. Once crime was as solitary as a cry of protest; now it is as universal as science. Yesterday it was put on trial; today it determines the law.
380. stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves
381. One leader, one people, signifies one master and millions of slaves.
382. When a war breaks out, people say: “It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.” But though a war may well be “too stupid,” that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.
383. It was in Spain that [my generation] learned that one can be right and yet be beaten, that force can vanquish spirit, that there are times when courage is not its own recompense. It is this, doubtless, which explains why so many, the world over, feel the Spanish drama as a personal tragedy.
384. No longer were there individual destinies; only a collective destiny, made of plague and emotions shared by all.
385. I rebel; therefore I exist.
386. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.
387. Find your happiness in yourself.
388. When the soul suffers too much, it develops a taste for misfortune.
389. If something is going to happen to me, I want to be there.
390. The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.
391. Every act of rebellion expresses a nostalgia for innocence and an appeal to the essence of being.
392. It’s better to bet on this life than on the next.
393. If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation.
394. In order to exist just once in the world, it is necessary never again to exist.
395. Note, besides, that it is no more immoral to directly rob citizens than to slip indirect taxes into the price of goods that they cannot do without.
396. The world is unimportant and whoever recognizes this conquers his liberty.
397. The struggle to the top alone will make a human heart SWELL.
398. There is no more futile punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
399. For the first time, the first, I laid my heart open to the benign indifference of the universe. To feel it so like myself, indeed so brotherly, made me realize that I’d been happy, and that I was happy still.
400. I looked up at the mass of signs and stars in the night sky and laid myself open for the first time to the benign indifference of the world.
401. Believe me, the hardest thing for a man to give up is that which he really doesn’t want, after all.
402. I was tormented by my desire for a woman … I thought so much about a woman, about women, about all the ones I had known, about all the circumstances in which I had enjoyed them, that my cell would be filled with their faces and crowded with my desires.
403. I always found misogyny vulgar and stupid, and I found almost all the women I have known to be my betters. However, placing them so high, I used them more often than I served them. How does one make sense of this?
404. … We need the sweet pain of anticipation to tell us we are really alive.
405. At 30 a man should know himself like the palm of his hand, know the exact number of his defects and qualities, know how far he can go, foretell his failures – be what he is. And, above all, accept these things.
406. In order to speak about all and to all, one has to speak of what all know and of the reality common to us all. The sea, rains, necessity, desire, the struggle against death… these are things that unite us all.
407. Don’t wait for the last judgment – it takes place every day.
408. The realization that life is absurd and cannot be an end, but only a beginning. This is a truth nearly all great minds have taken as their starting point. It is not this discovery that is interesting, but theconsequences and rules of action drawn from it.
409. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.
410. Men and women consume one another rapidly in what is called “the act of love,” or else settle down to a mild habit of conjugality. We seldom find a mean between these two extremes.
411. I understood, by dint of digging into my memories, that modesty helped me to shine, humility helped me to triumph and virtue to oppress.
412. If absolute truth belongs to anyone in this world, it certainly does not belong to the man or party that claims to possess it.
413. Camus himself described this work as ‘an attempt to understand the time I live in’.
414. But when a man has had only four hours’ sleep he isn’t sentimental. He sees things as they are: that is to say, he sees them in the garish light of justice; hideous, witless justice.
415. The absurd is essentially a divorce. It lies in neither of the elements compared; it is born of their confrontation.
416. A profound thought is in a constant state of becoming; it adopts the experience of a life and assumes its shape.
417. When one has extensively pondered about men, as a career or as a vocation, one sometimes feels nostalgic for primates. At least they do not have ulterior motives.
418. I am just coming out of five years of night, and this orgy of violent lights gives me for the first time the impression of a new continent. An enormous, 50-foot high Camel billboard : a GI with his mouth wide open blows enormous puffs of real smoke. So much bad taste hardly seems imaginable.
419. When I see a new face, something sets off an alarm bell inside me. ‘slow down! Danger!’ Even when the attraction is strongest, I am on my guard.
420. From Pandora’s Box, where all the ills of humanity swarmed, the Greeks drew out hope after all the others, as the most dreadful of all. I know no more stirring symbol; for, contrary to the general belief, hope equals resignation. And to live is not to resign oneself.
421. Those who lack the courage will always find a philosophy to justify it.
422. Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?
423. It is the job of thinking people not to be on the side of the executioners.
424. The slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown.
425. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no truth.
426. Too many have dispensed with generosity in order to practice charity.
427. I am too far away from what I love and my distance is without remedy.
428. All I maintain is that on this earth there are pestilences and there are victims, and it’s up to us, so far as possible, not to join forces with the pestilences. That may sound simple to the point of childishness; I can’t judge if it’s simple, but I know it’s true.
429. Myths are made for the imagination to breath life into them.
430. Charm is a way of getting the answer ‘Yes’ without asking a clear question.
431. Fancy language, like poplin, too often conceals an eczema.
432. Any authentic creation is a gift to the future.
433. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms. What I touch, what resists me – that I understand. And these two certainties – my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle – I also know that I cannot reconcile them. What other truth can I admit without lying, without bringing in a hope I lack and which means nothing within the limits of my conditions?
434. …there’s no question of heroism in all this. It’s a matter of common decency. That’s an idea which may make some people smile, but the only means of fighting a plague is – common decency.
435. The most exhausting effort in my life has been to suppress my own nature in order to make it serve my biggest plans.
436. Of course, true love is exceptional – two or three times a century, more or less. The rest of the time there is vanity or boredom.
437. The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically , expresses an aspiration for order .
438. For if I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers.
439. … one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.
440. Proof is never definitive, after all; one has to begin again with each new person.
441. I am too much in love with my lies and hypocrisies not to confess them fervently.
442. At a certain level of suffering or injustice no one can do anything for anyone. Pain is solitary.
443. Youth is above all a collection of possibilities.
444. Being is good, but getting rich is better…. If the gods had only the riches of men’s adoration, they would be as poor as poor Caligula.
445. Knowing what [Christ] knew , knowing all about mankind–ah! who would have thought that the crime is not so much to make others die, but to die oneself–confronted day and night with his innocent crime, it became too difficult to go on. It was better to get it over with, to not defend himself, to die, in order not to be the only one to have survived, and to go elsewhere, where, perhaps, he would be supported.
446. Old women even forget how to love their sons. The heart gets worn out, Monsieur.
447. So all a man could win in the conflict between plague and life was knowledge and memories.
448. The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor.
449. It should be pointed out for our own guidance in the West that the continual signing of manifestoes and protests is one of the surest ways of undermining the efficacy and dignity of the intellectual. There exists a permanent blackmail that we all know and that we must have the often solitary courage to resist.
450. I do not have much liking for the too famous existential philosophy, and, to tell the truth, I think its conclusions false.
451. The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.
452. The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.
453. It takes time to live. Like any work of art, life needs to be thought about.
454. Always there comes an hour when one is weary of one’s work and devotion to duty, and all one craves for is a loved face, the warmth and wonder of a loving heart.
455. When there is no hope, one must invent hope.
456. We all have a weakness for beauty.
457. If we believe in nothing, if nothing has any meaning and if we can affirm no values whatsoever, then everything is possible and nothing has any importance.
458. Still, obviously, one can’t be sensible all the time.
459. It is easier to kill what we do not know.
460. But in the end one needs more courage to live than to kill himself.
461. Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished, by millions of solitary individuals whose and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history.
462. I lived with the only continuity, day to day, of the me-me-me.
463. More and more, when faced with the world of men, the only reaction is one of individualism. Man alone is an end unto himself. Everything one tries to do for the common good ends in failure.
464. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman, and these hills, the softness of the sky, the outline of these trees at this very minute lose the illusory meaning with which we had clothed them, henceforth more remote than a lost paradise . . . that denseness and that strangeness of the world is absurd.
465. Every great work makes the human face more admirable and richer, and this is its whole secret.
466. No matter how the sun shone, the sea held forth no more promises.
467. None of the evils which totalitarianism … claims to remedy is worse than totalitarianism itself.
468. He was conscious of the disastrous fact that love and desire must be expressed in the same way.
469. The loss of love is the loss of all rights, even though one had them all.
470. Without freedom, no art; art lives only on the restraints it imposes on itself, and dies of all others.
471. It is normal to give away a little of one’s life in order not to lose it all.
472. Happiness and the absurd are two sons of the same earth. They are inseparable.
473. Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust, his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties, signifies nothing else.
474. As for those whose role it is to love us – I mean, relatives and in-laws (what a word)- It’s a different tune. They find the right word, but it’s usually the one that wounds.
475. All that I know most surely about morality and obligations I owe to football.
476. We know the surrealist solution: concrete irrationality, objective risk. Poetry is the conquest, the only possible conquest, of the ‘supreme position’, ‘a certain position of the mind from where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future… cease to be perceived in a contradictory sense.’
477. Whoever gives nothing, has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.
478. Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.
479. I do not believe in God and I am not an atheist.
480. Autumn is a second spring when every leaf is a flower.
481. Like great works, deep feelings always mean more than they are conscious of saying.
482. The act of love is a confession.
483. Absolute justice is achieved by the suppression of all contradiction, therefore it destroys freedom.
484. Do not wait for the Last Judgment. It takes place every day.
485. Perhaps we cannot prevent this world from being a world in which children are tortured. But we can reduce the number of tortured children.
486. Nature is a burning and frigid, transparent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but everything is given.
487. Purely historical thought is therefore nihilistic: it wholeheartedly accepts the evil of history and in this way is opposed to rebellion.
488. There is not one talent for living and another for creating. The same suffices for both. And one can be sure that the talent that could not produce but an artificial work could not sustain but a frivolous life.
489. The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy.
490. History only exists, in the final analysis, for God.
491. A taste for truth at any cost is a passion which spares nothing.
492. Do not be surprised. I do not like writers and I cannot stand their lies. They speak so as not to listen to themselves speak. If they did listen, they would know that they are nothing and then they would no longer be able to speak.
493. All men have a sweetness in their life. That is what helps them go on. It is towards that they turn when they feel too worn out.
494. Have you noticed that only death arouses our emotions? How we love thee friends who have just passed away, right? How we admire those master who no longer speak, their mouths full of dirt. We them we are not obligated.
495. The French Revolution gave birth to no artists but only to a great journalist, Desmoulins, and to an under-the-counter writer, Sade. The only poet of the times was the guillotine.
496. We must stitch up what has been torn apart, render justice imaginable in the world which is so obviously unjust, make happiness meaningful for nations poisoned by the misery of this century. Naturally, it is a superhuman task. But tasks are called superhuman when men take a long time to complete them, that is all.
497. Because,’ Cormery went on, ‘when I was very young, very foolish, and very much alone … you paid attention to me and, without seeming to, you opened for me the door to everything I love in the world.
498. Men like us are good and proud and strong…if we had a faith, a God, nothing could undermine us. But we had nothing, we had to learn everything, and living for honor alone has its weaknesses.
499. The need to be right is the sign of a vulgar mind.
500. One recognizes one’s course by discovering the paths that stray from it.
501. We do not know how to eliminate evil, but we do know how to feed some of the hungry and heal some of the infirmed.
502. He who despairs of the human condition is a coward, but he who has hope for it is a fool.
503. We have art in order not to die of life.
504. There is only one class of men, the privileged class
505. Culture: the cry of men in face of their destiny.
506. We always deceive ourselves twice about the people we love – first to their advantage, then to their disadvantage.
507. You know, a man always judges himself by the balance he can strike between the needs of his body and the demands of his mind. You’re judging yourself now, Mersaut, and you don’t like the sentence.
508. The absurd hero’s refusal to hope becomes his singular ability to live in the present with passion.
509. Truth and freedom, having few lovers, are demanding mistresses.
510. It’s not the struggle that makes us artists, but Art that makes us struggle.
511. But who would dare condemn me in this world with no judges, where no one is innocent!
512. If the descent is thus sometimes performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy.
513. The most loathsome materialism is not the kind people usually think of, but the sort that attempts to let dead ideas pass for living realities, diverting into sterile myths the stubborn and lucid attention we give to what we have within us that must forever die.
514. Time will prolong time, and life will serve life. In this field that is both limited and bulging with possibilities, everything to himself, except his lucidity, seems unforeseeable to him. What rule, then, could emanate from that unreasonable order? The only truth that might seem instructive to him is not formal: it comes to life and unfolds in men. The absurd mind cannot so much expect ethical rules at the end of its reasoning as, rather, illustrations and the breath of human lives.
515. I knew a pure heart who refused tot be mistrustful…. He had written at his doorstep: “From wherever you are, enter and be welcome”. Who do you think responded to this lovely invitation? The militia, who made themselves at home and gutted him.
516. I’d buy myself a cabin on the beach, I’d put some glue in my navel, and I’d stick a flag in there. Then I’d wait to see which way the wind was blowing.
517. The most important thing you do everyday you live is deciding not to kill yourself.
518. There is no shame in preferring happiness.
519. It is not the world that is absurd, nor human thought: the absurd arises when the human need to understand meets the unreasonableness of the world, when ‘my appetite for the absolute and for unity’ meets ‘the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle.
520. Beauty is unbearable, drives us to despair, offering us for a minute the glimpse of an eternity that we should like to stretch out over the whole of time.
521. In order to exist, man must rebel.
522. This very heart which is mine will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assurance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger to myself.
523. [Liberty] is a choreand a long-distance race, quite solitary, quite exhausting.
524. If nothing had any meaning, you would be right. But there is something that still has a meaning.
525. What would become of the world if the condemned started to confide their heartaches to the executioners?
526. The world is never quiet, even its silence eternally resounds with the same notes, in vibrations which escape our ears. As for those that we perceive, they carry sounds to us, occasionally a chord, never a melody.
527. All healthy men have thought of their own suicide
528. If Nietzsche is correct, that to shame a man is to kill him, then any honest attempt at autobiography will be an act of self-destruction.
529. To those who despair of everything reason cannot provide a faith, but only passion, and in this case it must be the same passion that lay at the root of the despair, namely humiliation and hatred.
530. We get into the habit of living before acquiring the habit of thinking. In that race which daily hastens us towards death, the body maintains its irreparable lead.
531. Sometimes, carrying on, just carrying on, is the superhuman achievement.
532. Freedom is not constituted primarily of privileges but of responsibilities.
533. Seeking what is true is not seeking what is desirable.
534. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy.
535. A symbol always transcends the one who makes use of it and makes him say in reality more than he is aware of expressing.
536. I had the whole sky in my eyes and it was blue and gold.
537. One must place one’s principles in big things. For the small, graciousness will suffice.
538. In our well-policed society we recognize that an illness is serious from the fact that we don’t dare speak of it directly.
539. Every writer, big or small, needs to say or write that the genius is always hissed at by his contemporaries. Naturally, this is not true, it happens only occasionally and often by chance. But this need within the writer is enlightening.
540. When one has no character, one HAS to apply a method. Here it did wonders incontrovertibly, and I am living on the site of one of the greatest crimes in human history.
541. For years I’ve wanted to live according to everyone else’s morals. I’ve forced myself to live like everyone else, to look like everyone else. I said what was necessary to join together, even when I felt separate. And after all of this, catastrophe came. Now I wander amid the debris, I am lawless, torn to pieces, alone and accepting to be so, resigned to my singularity and to my infirmities. And I must rebuild a truth-after having lived all my life in a sort of lie.
542. The words that reverberate for us at the confines of this long adventure of rebellion are not formulas for optimism, for which we have no possible use in the extremities of our unhappiness, but words of courage and intelligence which, on the shores of the eternal seas, even have the qualities of virtue.
543. We [Raymond and Meursault] stared at each other without blinking, and everything came to a stop there between the sea, the sand, and the sun, and the double silence of the flute and the water. It was then that I realized that you could either shoot or not shoot.
544. I would rather live my life as if there is a God and die to find out there isn’t, than live as if there isn’t and to die to find out that there is.
545. Nothing in the world is worth turning one’s back on what one loves
546. You always get exaggerated notions of things you don’t know anything about.
547. Every revolutionary ends up either by becoming an oppressor or a heretic.
548. I can negate everything of that part of me that lives on vague nostalgias, except this desire for unity, this longing to solve, this need for clarity and cohesion. I can refute everything in this world surrounding me that offends or enraptures me, except this chaos, this sovereign chance and this divine equivalence which springs from anarchy. I don’t know whether this world has meaning that transcends it. But I know that I do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. What can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? I can understand only in human terms.
549. Conscious of not being able to separate myself from my time, I have decided to become part of it.
550. Accepting the absurdity of everything around us is one step, a necessary experience: it should not become a dead end. It arouses a revolt that can become fruitful
551. Obstinacy alone is not a virtue.
552. Every artist preserves deep within him a single source from which, throughout his lifetime, he draws what he is, and what he says. When the source dries up, the work withers and crumbles.
553. Absurdism, like methodical doubt, has wiped the slate clean. It leaves us in a blind alley. But, like methodical doubt, it can, by returning upon itself, open up a new field of investigation, and in the process of reasoning then pursues the same course. I proclaim that I believe in nothing and that everything is absurd, but I cannot doubt the validity of my proclamation and I must at least believe in my protest.
554. Blessed are the hearts that can bend; they shall never be broken.
555. When I was young I asked more of people than they could give: everlasting friendship, endless feeling. Now I know to ask less of them than they can give: a straightforward companionship. And their feelings, their friendship, their generous actions seem in my eyes to be wholly miraculous: a consequence of grace alone.
556. We call first truths those we discover after all the others.
557. People don’t love each other at our age, Marthe—they please each other, that’s all. Later on, when you’re old and impotent, you can love someone. At our age, you just think you do. That’s all it is.
558. We are all exceptional cases. We all want to appeal against something! Each of us insists on being innocent at all cost, even if he has to accuse the whole human race and heaven itself.
559. I enjoyed my own nature to the fullest, and we all know there lies happiness, although, to soothe one another mutually, we occasionally pretend to condemn such joys as selfishness.
560. There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest — whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories — comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer.
561. Absolute virtue is impossible and the republic of forgiveness leads, with implacable logic, to the republic of the guillotine.
562. Children will still die unjustly even in a perfect society. Even by his greatest effort, man can only propose to diminish, arithmetically, the sufferings of the world.
563. Basically, at the very bottom of life, which seduces us all, there is only absurdity, and more absurdity. And maybe that’s what gives us our joy for living, because the only thing that can defeat absurdity is lucidity.
564. One always has exaggerated ideas about what one doesn’t know.
565. But it’s not easy. I’ve been thinking it over for years. While we loved each other we didn’t need words to make ourselves understood. But people don’t love forever. A time came when I should have found the words to keep her with me, only I couldn’t.
566. Your successes and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them.
567. At the heart of all beauty lies something inhuman.
568. Although it was the middle of winter, I finally realized that, within me, summer was inextinguishable.
569. To assert in any case that a man must be absolutely cut off from society because he is absolutely evil amounts to saying that society is absolutely good, and no-one in his right mind will believe this today.
570. We must admit that today conformity is on the Left. To be sure, the Right is not brilliant. But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws. The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.
571. When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
572. Rule: Start by looking for what is valid in every man.
573. One dies if necessary, one breaks rather than bending. But I bend, because I continue to love myself.
574. A living man can be enslaved and reduced to the historic condition of an object. But if he dies in refusing to be enslaved, he reaffirms the existence of another kind of human nature which refuses to be classified as an object.
575. Every stone here sweats with suffering, I know that. I have never looked at them without a feeling of anguish. But deep in my heart I know that the most wretched among you have seen a divine face emerge from their darkness. That is the face you are asked to see.
576. The innocent is the person who explains nothing
577. No cause justifies the deaths of innocent people.
578. History has shown that the less people read, the more books they buy.
579. Where there is no hope, it is incumbent on us to invent it.
580. I spent a long time looking at faces, drinking in smiles. Am I happy or unhappy? It’s not a very important question. I live with such frenzied intensity. Things and people are waiting for me, and doubtless I am waiting for them and desiring them with all my strength and sadness. But, here, I earn the right to be alive by silence and by secrecy. The miracle of not having to talk about oneself.
581. I don’t want to be a genius-I have enough problems just trying to be a man.
582. My chief occupation, despite appearances, has always been love.
583. If the world were clear, art would not exist.
584. I love life – that’s my real weakness. I love it so much that I am incapable of imagining what is not life.
585. To grow old is to pass from passion to compassion.
586. I have a very old and very faithful attachment for dogs. I like them because they always forgive.
587. The best are led to make greater demands upon themselves. As for those who succumb, they did not deserve to survive.
588. A man who has become conscious of the absurd is for ever bound to it.
589. If those whom we begin to love could know us as we were before meeting them they could perceive what they have made of us.
590. It is always easy to be logical. It is almost impossible to be logical to the bitter end.
591. There is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.
592. He had opened his heart to the sublime indifference of the universe
593. There can be no question of masking the evidence, of suppressing the absurd by denying one of the terms of its equation. It is essential to know whether one can live with it or whether, on the other hand, logic commands one to die of it.
594. Integrity has no need of rules.
595. There is nothing abstract about pain. It is specific, it is real, and, when it is intense, it is world destroying.
596. That’s love, giving everything, sacrificing all without hope of return.
597. People believe a man is in distress because his loved one dies in one day. But his real pain is less futile: it is that he finds out that sadness too does not last. Even pain has no meaning.
598. Old married people look so much alike that they have the same number of hairs in their ears.
599. The truth is that everyone is bored, and devotes himself to cultivating habits.
600. What is human in me is not what is best in me. What is human in me is that I desire, and to obtain what I desire, I believe I would crush anything that stood in my way
601. The real 19th century prophet was Dostoevsky, not Karl Marx.
602. In art, rebellion is consummated and perpetuated in the act of real creation, not in criticism or commentary.
603. You will never be able to experience everything. So, please, do poetical justice to your soul and simply experience yourself.
604. … it is true that I do not respect [human life] more than I respect my own life. And if it is easy for me to kill, that is because it is difficult for me to die.
605. I felt as I hadn’t felt for ages. I had a foolish desire to burst into tears. for the first time I’d realized how all these people loathed me.
Conclusion:
Albert Camus’ exploration of life’s meaning and the absurd continues to inspire and challenge readers today.
This thought-provoking Albert Camus quotes not only serve as a window into his philosophy but also offer timeless wisdom that resonates with modern struggles and questions about existence.
By reflecting on his words, we are reminded to confront the absurdity of life with courage, embrace the present, and seek personal meaning in a seemingly indifferent world.
Camus’ legacy lives on through these powerful reflections that continue to shape our understanding of humanity.
